I have a simple happy path scenario for ordering a Service Catalog Item and I'm wanting my Flow Designer flow to be triggered. The problem is that my Flow is NOT being triggered. I can easily test this within Flow Designer and it works perfectly but it doesn't work when ordering a SC request item.
It appears the root cause is a business rule called "Start FlowDesigner Flow." It requires the stage to be equal to request_approved upon an update scenario. But, in my case the request item is being created brand new (insert) and the default value in the state field is "waiting_for_approval." More detail is below showing all the steps I've verified.
How do I get my Flow to trigger successfully in this scenario?
I've checked off all the items I'm supposed to do to make this happen. For example,...
- Activate Flow Designer support for Service Catalog. DONE.
- Create a flow with a Service Catalog trigger. DONE.
- Create a Service Catalog Request and make sure the Flow is selected as the process engine as well as workflow and Execution Plan is empty. DONE.
Images below show each step I've taken. Any help is greatly appreciated.
Below image shows I have a simple flow which I can test successfully inside Flow Designer.
Below image shows my Catalog Item that is attached to my "Simple Flow Test" flow.
This is a test of actually ordering the Request Item.
This shows my requested item is set to "waiting_for_approval" by default for the stage.
Finally, here is the business rule that may be the problem (at least the way I'm intepreting). Notice it triggers only on update and then the stage must be equal to "request_approved." My requested item surely won't be "request_approved" initially as I wanted to setup the approvers inside my Flow (which I cannot even get my flow to trigger).
p.s., there is another post very similar to mine that doesn't fully explain how to resolve this predicament.
Here is the final solution that resolves this. I needed to add a business rule that triggers on insert of sc_request. However, the solution cannot simply execute for all sc_request insertions. Rather, I only wanted it to trigger for my specific sc_request. Therefore, my business rule setup is listed below. Notice that I'm specifically looking for attached sc_req_item records that have the exact number of variables as well as the exact named variables I'm looking for. If it matches, then the script will update the sc_request.approve to approved. Hopefully this helps others if they are struggling.
The "request" stage is set to "requested" as image shows below. I did find out one more thing. In my personal free instance of SN, the default value for the sc_req_item stage is set to "request_approved" and thus my flow is starting there. It's just in my company's test instance that it's being set to waiting_for_approval for some reason. I'm going to look through business rules to see where this is happening. I don't believe this was changed by any of our developers but it may be possible. Additional feedback welcome and thank you.
Also, one more tidbit I found out from my team is that Integration Hub is currently disabled. However, I don't believe that is my root cause of this very simple happy path since I'm not trying to integration with a 3rd party.
Here is my personal free dev instance where Flow is triggering correctly.
I found out a little more on this after comparing my personal instance (which is triggering my flows fine) and our company test instance. In my personal instance, I've noticed that the request.approval field is being set to "Approved" somehow even though the default value in both my test and company is set to "not requested." What this means is that there is a business rule that fires called "Cascade Request Approval to Request Item" which will update all the sc_req_item records to approval=requested and stage=request_approved.
Although this still does not resolve my problem, I'm very close to understanding why my personal dev instance is working and our company test instance is not. If I could answer this question, I may have found the problem - why is my personal test instance updating the sc_request.approval field to Approved when the default value is "not requested?"
I figured out why my personal test instance is working fine. It's because there is a workflow that comes out of the box as shown below. This workflow apparently is just a sample workflow that's not enabled in our test instance. This my sc_request is NOT getting set to Approved which means my sc_req_items.stage is NOT getting set to request_approved which means Business Rule "Start FlowDesigner Flow" is NOT starting.
Whew! Okay, I figured out why, at least technically, my flow designer is not getting triggered because our company has disabled the sample workflow (see image below). But, doesn't every company disable this sample workflow? Then what is best practice for triggering a Service Catalog in the Flows? Should I create another simple one-step work flow that simply changes the sc_request.approval to Approved? That would work but seems odd that I would have to do that.
